CERN's decision to end cooperation with Russian scientists criticised by Moscow

20 March 2024

CERN, the European Council for Nuclear Research, is to cut cooperation with Russian scientists later this year, a decision the country's Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova called "politically motivated and absolutely unacceptable".

CERN's Large Hadron Collider (Image: CERN)

CERN was established in 1953, with cooperation with the Soviet Union first formalised in 1967. In 1993 a Cooperation Agreement was signed with the Russian Federation, which led on to the 2019 International Cooperation Agreement, which is in force until 30 November 2024 and constitutes the framework for cooperation between the parties.

Following a March 2022 United Nations General Assembly Resolution, entitled "Aggression Against Ukraine”, it suspended the Observer status of the Russian Federation until further notice and "the effective suspension of all exchanges of funds, materials and personnel in both directions with the Russian Federation and the Republic of Belarus, and suspended the participation of CERN scientists in all scientific committees of institutions located in the Russian Federation and the Republic of Belarus, and vice versa".

The decision to end the cooperation agreement was taken in December 2023 when CERN's Council passed a resolution "to terminate the International Cooperation Agreement between CERN and the Russian Federation, together with all related protocols and addenda, with effect from 30 November 2024; To terminate ... all other agreements and experiment memoranda of understanding allowing the participation of the Russian Federation and its national institutes in the CERN scientific programme, with effect from 30 November 2024; AFFIRMS That these measures concern the relationship between CERN and Russian and Belarusian institutes and do not affect the relationship with scientists of Russian nationality affiliated with other institutes". The cooperation agreement with Belarus will come to an end on 27 June, before the Russian one ends.

Russian scientists are continuing to work at CERN at the moment - earlier this week Pavel Logachev, director of the Institute of Nuclear Physics at the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, told the TASS news agency that six of their researchers would continue their work at CERN until the end of the agreement.

And a spokesperson for the Institute of Nuclear Physics at the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences told TASS: "The decision will negatively affect scientific research carried out both by CERN and Russian institutions. A process is currently under way to hand things over to our colleagues from various CERN member states, which is expected to be completed by November 2024."

When asked about the situation on Wednesday, the Russian Foreign Ministry's Zakharova called the CERN decision a "political" one that was "unacceptable", saying it runs "completely counter to the spirit of scientific cooperation ... foreign researchers and companies willing to boost cooperation with our country are the victims of this aggressive campaign".

CERN, which is based in Geneva, says its mission is to help "uncover what the universe is made of and how it works. We do this by providing a unique range of particle accelerator facilities to researchers, to advance the boundaries of human knowledge". Among its achievements have been the Large Hadron Collider, which started up in 2009, the Higgs boson was discovered in 2012 and it was also the birthplace of the World Wide Web. CERN has 23 Member States, 10 Associate Member States and includes 17,000 people from all over the world, with more than 110 nationalities represented.

Researched and written by World Nuclear News

OPENING THE QUANTUM UNIVERSE

Rice nuclear physics team tapped to lead $15 million Large Hadron Collider upgrade project

Wei Li directing U.S. build of massive timing components for CMS experiment

Grant and Award Announcement

RICE UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: 

NICOLE LEWIS, MIKE MATVEEV, PROF. WEI LE, AND FRANK GEURTS. PHOTO COURTESY OF RICE UNIVERSITY.

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CREDIT: PHOTO COURTESY OF RICE UNIVERSITY

A team of physicists at Rice University led by Wei Li has been awarded a five-year, $15.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Nuclear Physics, marking a significant leap forward in the realm of high-energy nuclear physics.

This prestigious grant will pave the way for a new frontier of scientific discoveries within the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) program.

The CMS experiment is one of two large general-purpose particle physics detectors built on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the European organization for nuclear research located on the border of France and Switzerland.

The team from Rice includes co-principal investigator Frank Geurts and researchers Nicole Lewis and Mike Matveev.

Under Li’s guidance, a collaborative effort between Rice, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Oak Ridge National Lab, University of Illinois Chicago, and University of Kansas will embark on the development of an ultra-fast silicon timing detector named the endcap timing layer (ETL). This cutting-edge technology forms a crucial component of the CMS experiment’s upgrades and is poised to revolutionize our understanding of fundamental physics.

“The ETL will enable breakthrough science in the area of heavy ion collisions, allowing us to delve into the properties of a remarkable new state of matter called the quark-gluon plasma,” said Li, a professor of physics and astronomy at Rice. “This, in turn, offers invaluable insights into the strong nuclear force that binds particles at the core of matter.”

Key features of the ETL include two disks on each side of the CMS detector accounting for half of the entire international ETL project and boasting a time resolution of 30 picoseconds per particle.

The detector will enable unprecedented particle identification capabilities through precise time-of-flight measurements, contributing to the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC), an upgrade to the LHC that is scheduled to launch in 2029. The HL-LHC will operate at about 10 times the luminosity of the collider’s original configuration.

Increasing luminosity produces more data, allowing physicists to study known mechanisms in greater detail and observe rare new phenomena that might reveal themselves. For example, HL-LHC will produce at least 15 million Higgs bosons per year compared to around three million collected during LHC operation in 2017.

Upon completion, the ETL will enable the investigation of a wide range of physics, including not only the study of quark-gluon plasma and the search for the Higgs boson, but also for extra dimensions and particles that could make up dark matter.

Beyond its impact on the LHC, the results of the ETL project hold tremendous potential for synergy with other leading-edge facilities like the electron-ion collider at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory in Long Island, New York. The project is set to shape the scientific landscape in the coming decade.

Li received his Ph.D. in experimental particle and nuclear physics at MIT in 2009. Following a postdoc position at MIT working on the first relativistic heavy ion physics program on the CMS experiment at the LHC, he joined the Rice faculty in 2012. His work has been recognized with a White House Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, an Early Career Award from the DOE and a Sloan Research Fellowship.

This grant is administered by the DOE (DE-SC0024846).

PATHFINDERS – HOW MUCH DOES DARK MATTER?

SOCIALIST STANDARD no-1435-march-2024

Pure science, from a capitalist point of view, is a bit like kissing frogs. You have to kiss a lot of frogs before one turns into a handsome princely profit. Sometimes – rarely – a technical project offers a large and obvious return on investment (ROI), even though the payout might be years or even decades away. With nuclear fusion, for example, the potential ROI is enormous and alluring, but while the boffins swear the idea works in theory, the technical challenges of putting the sun in a box are immense and not always known in advance, which usually means spiralling costs. The €5bn price tag for the experimental Iter fusion plant in southern France has more than quadrupled to €22bn, and now the schedule has been put back a further ten years. This puts European state investors in something of a sunk-cost bind. The risk of fusion never working is not as bad as it working, and China or Russia getting the jump on it. The British state recently managed to Brexit itself out of the Iter project, but Euro-governments generally see no option but to continue shovelling money into it.

Nothing about science is guaranteed. Even if it works, it might never result in any marketable technology. One project that paid off is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Switzerland, the rarest kind of all-level success story. As is commonly known, protons and neutrons are not fundamental particles, but are made up of combinations of quarks. Such combinations go by the name of hadrons, and smashing them together at super-high speed to see what pops out seemed like a very good idea, from the boffins’ point of view. From a government funding point of view, the ultimate composition of matter promised no ROI that mattered, but since one can never be sure, and because this was leading-edge research, they rolled the dice anyway.

CERN proved to be a smashing success, discovering more than 50 new hadrons, not to mention the Higgs boson in 2012 (tinyurl.com/yeyn92vk). It also unexpectedly spawned a side-bonanza for capitalism that had nothing to do with hadrons, or even physics. Tim Berners-Lee, a computer scientist working at CERN, came up with the worldwide web, which revolutionised capitalism.

So, CERN has become the poster child for capitalist science in Europe. But the hard questions of physics remain intractable. The ‘standard model’ has gaping holes. Assuming that Einstein’s theory of gravity is correct even at the largest scales, there should be around another 30 percent of ‘stuff’ in the universe to explain why galaxies don’t spin themselves to bits. No current device can detect this ‘dark matter’. Furthermore, nobody can explain why the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, except with a putative ‘dark energy’ which represents 70 percent of ‘stuff’ but also can’t be detected.

Since smashing stuff together seems to work, experimental physicists have proposed an obvious solution – smash even more stuff together even more violently with a vastly bigger installation. They want to build the Future Circular Collider (FCC), a €20bn monster that would make the LHC look like a desktop pinball game (tinyurl.com/mr2vj67j). But this proposal to find fundamental answers raises fundamental questions about what investors are willing to stump up for.

The problem is, if the FCC enthusiasts are saying €20bn now, and if Iter is anything to go by, the actual cost could end up being multiples of this estimate. Euro ministers are choking on their lattes at the idea, and even some physicists are calling it ‘reckless’ and questioning whether ‘bigger, faster, harder’ is the best way to go. The biggest possible Earth-based collider could anyway never achieve more than a fraction of the colossal energies released in cosmic rays, meaning such exotic conditions will always be out of reach. And what if dark matter turns out not to exist, and is instead, like phlogiston, a supposition based on a wrong theory? Then, obviously, the FCC won’t find it. Would the boffins then demand even bigger and more expensive colliders, one after another, until they’ve got one the size of the solar system? Besides, with the climate crisis, pandemics, AI and other more immediate concerns, aren’t there bigger priorities for science budgets right now?

Government money comes from taxes on profits, which the rich get by exploiting us workers. We don’t get any say in how governments spend this cash, but the rich certainly do have an influence. And it’s a moot question how much the nature of reality actually matters to them, especially when the costs keep going up. Will they get tired of stuffing coins into the fruit machine of physics and watching the lemons whizz by?

Workers, meanwhile, have a more pressing concern, to get rid of capitalism and the rule of the rich. But a socialist society will still have to answer the fundamental question, which is how badly we want to know and how hard we are collectively prepared to work to find out. There’s always the possibility that people in socialism will not be willing to construct mega-colliders, despite what physicists say, and will decide to put their creative efforts into other things like space exploration, or undersea cities, or transhumanism, or rewilding the planet, or creating great art. But there’s no doubt that human beings do value the quest for knowledge for its own sake, in any society that claims to be civilised. The specific problem for science in capitalism is that it has to follow capitalism’s skewed money-agenda, where lofty goals may be celebrated, but the decisive factor is usually the bottom line, the factional advantage, and that all-important ROI.

PJS

Where Do Humans Fit in the Universe? This Physicist Wants to Change Your Perspective

In Waves in an Impossible Sea, Matt Strassler explains how human life is intimately connected to the larger cosmos.

By Isaac Schultz
Published Yesterday

An artist’s concept of a particle collision.

Illustration: Jurik Peter (Shutterstock)

Pondering the scale of the cosmos can feel as if you’re peering over the edge of the brink; it can be daunting enough to make you want to flee to the comforts of working, commuting, and other quotidian endeavors. But in Waves in an Impossible Sea: How Everyday Life Emerges From the Cosmic Ocean, theoretical physicist and science communicator Matt Strassler doesn’t flinch in the face of the universe.

Published this week, Strassler’s book expands on the ideas he’s explored for years on his blog, Of Particular Significance. Readers are given a window into how the fundamental laws that govern the universe shape our daily experiences, and how even the most exotic phenomena are not as alien to our day-to-day as they may seem.

‘Huh, That’s Funny’: Physicists Delighted by New Measurement for the W Boson

10 Years After the Higgs Boson, What's the Next Big Thing for Physics?

What Should Fans Take Away From Imaginary?

Strassler recently spoke with Gizmodo about the book’s origins and goals. Below is our conversation, lightly edited for clarity.

Isaac Schultz, Gizmodo: There’s this interesting dichotomy between the physics that’s happening here on Earth, what I call “looking down,” and the physics that’s astronomical observation—“looking up,” so to speak. And I was wondering if you have thought about the same thing, and how you see that relationship.

Matt Strassler: One of the first things I try to do in the book is to break that dichotomy down. Because we do have this tendency to think about the universe writ large, this big place that we live in. And then there’s kind of this tiny stuff going on inside of us or inside of the materials around us, and we don’t really connect them. But of course, they are profoundly connected. And, you know, the universe—we used to call it outer space, and we think of it as mostly a vacuum. It’s emptiness. But the stuff that’s inside of us is also mostly empty. It’s the same emptiness. And so there is no distinction between the outer-ness and the inner-ness. It’s the same stuff doing many of the same things. We’re not disconnected from that larger universe. We’re actually, in some sense, made from it. And so, that is a message which I wanted to be able to convey that I hope will change people’s perspective on how they think about what it is to be alive in this universe. That we don’t just live in it, but we grow from it in a very meaningful sense: not just in a spiritual one, but in a very explicit physics sense.


Gizmodo: Yeah. Whenever I’m slightly stressed out, I remind myself that I am just dying particles.

Strassler: We are much more than that. But even when we say we are particles, we are missing something. In English, by a particle we mean a little localized thing, like a dust particle, that’s not connected to everything else. But when we understand that what we call particles are actually little ripples, little waves in the fields of the universe, and the fields of the universe extend everywhere. Across the entire universe. That’s a very different way of understanding what we’re made from. We’re not made from these little localized things that move around in a universe. We’re made from ripples of a universe, and that is a very different picture.

Gizmodo: The crux of the book is this relationship between our modern understanding of physics and human life, human existence as we experience it. When you were writing the book, did you have a specific reader in mind? Who do you hope will, you know, stumble across this title and pick it up?

Strassler: There are certainly some readers who read a lot of particle physics books already, and I hope that for them, what I’m providing is a way of looking at something they already know. And in particular a way of understanding what the Higgs field is all about. For those readers, it’s something they will not have seen before. But I also had in mind that there are a lot of friends of mine, family members, who don’t read the books about particle physics precisely because they’re rather difficult to understand and often seem irrelevant to their lives. The goal of this book was to strip away, as much as possible, the things that don’t matter to our ordinary daily existence and focus on the things that do. And try to tell a story, which certainly doesn’t explain all of particle physics by any means, but walks a path that takes the reader through all of the things that they would need to know to start from scratch and come out the end with a sense for how the universe works and how we fit in it.


I hope that I’ve provided a path for a reader who is curious but willing to take the time that it requires to understand subjects that are that aren’t hard just because “physics is hard.” They’re hard because the universe is hard. It’s hard for me. I can’t make it any easier than it is for me.

Gizmodo: That’s going to be the headline. “Physicist Confesses: ‘It’s Hard For Me, Too.’”


Strassler: Okay. I’m happy with that.

Gizmodo: How did this book emerge from the work that you’ve been doing for years?


Strassler: I was a full-time academic scientist for a good two decades. I had always been interested in doing public outreach. But I had never had really that much time being a full-time scientist. There was a certain moment in my career where it wasn’t clear what I wanted to do next. And I started a blog at that point. That was just before the expected and then actual discovery of what is known as the particle called the Higgs boson.



Image: Basic Books

The story of the Higgs particle is really a story of a field known as the Higgs field, which is much more important to us than the Higgs particle is. The Higgs field affects our lives in all sorts of ways. But to understand what the Higgs field is and how it does what it does, which is typically what people ask me, requires some understanding of both Einstein’s relativity and quantum physics. There wasn’t any way to write the book without starting with those things. Even though explaining the Higgs field was the original motivation, I discovered that really this is a book about what we know today based on the last 125 years of scientific research in physics: what is the big picture? How does it all fit together? And once you see that—once you understand what particles actually are and how they emerge from relativity on the one hand and quantum physics on the other—then it’s not so hard to explain what the Higgs field is. But you have to spend two-thirds of the book to get to that point.


Gizmodo: When you say to someone that you’re going to open with relativity and quantum physics, it’s a great way to end the conversation.

Strassler: There is that risk, right? But that’s part of why I really opened with the questions about those subjects that are not even obviously about them. They are questions about daily life. And the fact is that these subjects, which seem remote and very esoteric... they’re not. They’re deeply ingrained in ordinary human experience. And that was really what I wanted to convey in this book, that these rather strange-sounding subjects that originate with Einstein and are made often in the media and by scientists to seem, “gee whiz”—and they are—they’re more than that. They are the foundations of our daily experiences. And so I wanted to bring that sense of how important these things are to us, to all of us.


Gizmodo: I think that, scientists on the one hand and science communicators on the other, struggle with this issue of, well, it’s not going to be possible to convey all the nuance in, say, a 400-word article. It’s just not going to happen. It’s more about writing the least-wrong thing than the most-right thing. You wrote a book that grapples with complex science. How were you checking to make sure that this would actually grok to the average reader?

Strassler: It helps that I have had the blog for 10 years. I also have some humility about how well I have achieved this goal. That’s partly because I know these are difficult subjects. They’re not difficult in the sense of that you have to know mathematics to grapple with them, but they’re difficult in the sense that they are just strange and difficult for scientists to wrap their heads around. I know that whatever methods I have used in the book, they’re going to work for some people on some pages and for other people on other pages. And so one of the things that I’m doing with my website is, I’m creating a whole wing of the website whose goal is to add additional information. For example, the figures, some will be animated on the website to give greater clarity. The goal is to really explain the science, and I’m not done with that part.

Gizmodo: It’s been over ten years since the Higgs discovery. How do you go about writing this book, thinking about a post-Higgs world and trying to address the next big question?

Strassler: In a sense, the discovery of the Higgs boson and the lack of any immediate discoveries thereafter over the ensuing 10 years—leaving aside gravitational waves, which were discovered in 2015—has put our understanding of the universe into a very interesting place. It’s like having a short story which is complete but has all sorts of loose ends, which fits into a larger narrative which we don’t understand. And so it’s kind of a perfect moment to describe what we know and what we don’t. And really break it into those two parts.

There was a way in which, 10 years after the Higgs discovery, and also with the discovery of gravitational waves, things came out more or less the way we thought they would. There were no huge surprises that completely changed the way we think about things. So it’s a good moment to take stock and to look at what we have learned from Einstein’s relativity, on the one hand, and from quantum physics and all of its realization in particle physics on the other, and see how it all fits together and try to really describe that as a package.

To use a cliche, it’s really more like the end of the beginning here. We have achieved something that is really remarkable in the past 125 years. But we’re clearly also in some ways still at the beginning of our understanding of how the universe really works.


Gizmodo: One question that I was left with was basically, where is this next breakthrough going to come from? Do you have any particular preference for the variety of wonderful experiments going on right now in particle physics, in plans for gravitational wave observatories, all that jazz? What are you most excited about on the physical horizon?

Strassler: All the way up to the discovery of the Higgs boson, there has been a path. But there’s always been something where it’s clear that there are things we need to know that in some way feed into the deepest questions about how the universe works. And for the first time in 150 years, that is no longer true.

We do not now have a clear path. We have many possible paths, and we don’t really know which one is the best one. And this is part of why there is so much controversy about particle physics right now. It’s because there are definitely things that we know give us a decent chance of finding something new. But we don’t have the kind of confidence that we would have had 30 years ago or 60 years ago, that the next wave of experiments definitely will answer one or more of the questions that we have.

So when you ask me what is my preferred direction, I would prefer that the Large Hadron Collider, which has 10 more years to run, discover something. Because that would make it a lot easier to know what to do next. And the machine will run for 10 more years, producing 10 times as much data. So we do have that opportunity. But, I would like a clue from nature before answering that question.

Gizmodo: You mention that the LHC is keeps on ticking and you know, the high-luminosity LHC is on the horizon. Do you anticipate that kind of juicing the the collider will yield results?

Strassler: I’m not a person to express optimism or pessimism about what nature may deliver to us. I mean, I don’t think I have the insights into nature to guess. But what I can say is that there is an enormous amount still to do, even with the data that we have. It is certainly possible that there is something to discover in the existing LHC data, in addition to the opportunities that having 10 times that data will offer. So, I think people are sometimes too quick to imagine that, “oh well, the LHC looked. It’s not there. We’re done.” No, no, no, no. The LHC produces an enormous pile of data, and every analysis you do has to cut through that data in a particular way.



I wouldn’t say optimistic or pessimistic, but I would say I’m cognizant of the fact that there is still a tremendous amount left to do at the LHC, and we should definitely not be writing it off at all at this point. What we can probably say with some certainty is that the most popular ideas for what might be found at the Large Hadron Collider are mostly ruled out or unlikely at this point, but there are plenty of things, plenty of examples in history where the thing that was really interesting was something that no theoretical physicist had imagined. And we may just need to be really imaginative about how we analyze the data at the LHC.

CERN proposes $17 billion particle smasher that would be 3 times bigger than the Large Hadron Collider

Ben Turner
Thu, February 8, 2024 

A schematic map showing a possible location for the Future Circular Collider.

Researchers at the world's biggest particle accelerator have put forward proposals to build a new, even larger atom smasher.

The $17 billion Future Circular Collider (FCC) would be 57 miles (91 kilometers) long, dwarfing its predecessor, the 16.5-mile-long (27 kilometers) Large Hadron Collider (LHC), located at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva.

Physicists want to use the FCC's increased size and power to probe fringes of the Standard Model of particle physics, the current best theory that describes how the smallest components of the universe behave. By smashing particles at even higher energies (100 tera electron volts, compared with the LHC's 14), the researchers hope to find unknown particles and forces; discover why matter outweighs antimatter; and probe the nature of dark matter and dark energy, two invisible entities believed to make up 95 percent of the universe.

Related: Our universe is merging with 'baby universes,' causing it to expand, new theoretical study suggests

"The FCC will not only be a wonderful instrument to improve our understanding of the fundamental laws of physics and nature," Fabiola Gianotti, CERN's director-general, said at a news conference Monday (Feb. 5). "It will also be a driver of innovation, because we will need new advanced technologies, from cryogenics to superconducting magnets, vacuum technologies, detectors, instrumentation — technologies with a potentially huge impact on our society and huge socioeconomic benefits."

Atom smashers like the LHC collide protons together at near light speed while looking for rare decay products that could be clues to new particles or forces. This helps physicists scrutinize their best understanding of the universe's most fundamental building blocks and how they interact, described by the Standard Model of physics.

Though the Standard Model has enabled scientists to make remarkable predictions — such as the existence of the Higgs boson, discovered by the LHC in 2012 — physicists are far from satisfied with it and are constantly looking for new physics that might break it.

This is because the model, despite being our most comprehensive one yet, includes enormous gaps, making it totally incapable of explaining where the force of gravity comes from, what dark matter is made of, or why there is so much more matter than antimatter in the universe.

To unlock these new frontiers, physicists at CERN will use the sevenfold increase in beam energy of the FCC to accelerate particles to even higher speeds.

But the detector, despite having taken a promising step forward, is far from built. The proposals put forward by CERN are part of an interim report on a feasibility study set to be finished next year. Once it's complete and if the detector plans go ahead, CERN — which is run by 18 European Union member states, as well as Switzerland, Norway, Serbia, Israel and the U.K. — will likely look for additional funding from nonmember states for the project.

Despite the high hopes for what the new collider could find, some scientists remain skeptical that the expensive machine will encounter new physics.

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"The FCC would be more expensive than both the LHC and LIGO [Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory] combined and it has less discovery potential," Sabine Hossenfelder, a theoretical physicist at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, wrote in a 2019 post on the platform X, formerly Twitter. "It would, at the present state of knowledge and technology, not give a good return on investment. There are presently better avenues to pursue than high energy physics."

Member states will meet in 2028 to decide whether to greenlight the project. Then, the first phase of the machine — which would collide electrons with their animatter counterparts, positrons — would come online in 2045. Finally, in the 2070s, the FCC would begin slamming protons into one another.

How the Large Hadron Collider's successor will hunt for the dark universe

Robert Lea

SPACE.COM
Thu, February 8, 2024 

Planning is well underway for the successor to the world's most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

The new "atom smasher," named the Future Circular Collider (FCC), will dwarf the LHC in size and power. It will smash particles together with so much energy, in fact, that scientists say it may be capable of investigating our universe's most mysterious entities: Dark energy and dark matter.

LHC operators at CERN revealed the results of a "midterm review" of their FCC Feasibility Study to the press on Monday (Feb. 5). The feasibility study began in 2021 and is set to conclude in 2025. The findings thus far constitute three years of work, with scientists and engineers from across the globe determining the placement of the new accelerator's ring, the implementation of the FCC facility, concepts for detectors and funding aspects.


The FCC will run under the jurisdiction of France and Switzerland, just like the LHC currently does, but the future accelerator will stretch 56.5 miles (90.7 kilometers), making it over three times the length of CERN's current particle accelerator, which is 16.8 miles (27 kilometers) long. The LHC is the largest and most powerful particle accelerator in the world.

Related: Dark matter may be hiding in the Large Hadron Collider's particle jets

A small stretch of the near 17-mile-long LHC particle accelerator which will be dwarfed by the FCC. (Image credit: Robert Lea)

The FCC will operate in the same way as the LHC, accelerating charged particles around a loop, using superconducting magnets, then smashing them together as they approach the speed of light.

Scientists can probe fundamental physics by observing showers of secondary particles created when particles like protons slam together. But whereas the LHC can attain energies of around 13 terra electronvolts (TeV) when operating at full power, CERN says the FCC should be able to reach energies as great as 100 TeV.

"Our aim is to study the properties of matter at the smallest scale and highest energy," CERN director-general Fabiola Gianotti said at the interim report presentation in Geneva on Tuesday (Feb 6.)
Why do particle accelerators need more power?

The crowning achievement of the LHC thus far is undoubtedly the discovery of the Higgs Boson, the force-carrying particle of a field called the Higgs Field, which permeates the universe and dictates most other particles' masses.

The breakthrough sighting of the Higgs Boson by two LHC detectors was announced on July 4, 2012, and is credited with completing the Standard Model of particle physics, which is humanity's best description of the universe, its particles and their interactions on a subatomic scale.

Yet, the Standard Model still requires some tweaking — and, since 2012, scientists have been using the LHC to search for physics beyond the model to make those adjustments. Success has been limited. This search will get a boost when the LHC's high luminosity upgrade is completed, which will mean the particle accelerator can perform more collisions and offer scientists more opportunities to spot exotic physics.

THE GOD DAMN PARTICLE

A Higgs boson decays recorded in a particle collision recorded by the ATLAS detector at the LHC on May 18, 2012. (Image credit: ATLAS)



The two main outliers of the Standard Model (aka, why some of those tweaks are necessary) are dark matter and dark energy.

Sometimes collectively known as the "dark universe," these phenomena constitute such large mysteries for scientists because dark energy accounts for around 68% of the universe's energy and matter, while dark matter accounts for around 27% of these continents. But neither can be seen because they don't interact with light, and no one has been able to pin them down through other forms of direct detection, either. That means that the matter and energy we understand and can account for comprise no more than 5% of the universe's contents, and we have little idea what around 95% of the universe actually is.

And probing these aspects of the universe may require smashing particles together with much more energy than the high-luminosity LHC is capable of.

To begin with, dark matter can't be "standard matter" like the atoms that make up the stuff we see around us on an everyday basis, like stars, planets and our bodies. Remember how it doesn't interact with light? Well, protons, neutrons and electrons — collectively known as "baryons" — do. So, dark matter must be something else.

Currently, the only way scientists can infer the presence of dark matter is via its interaction with gravity and the effect this has on baryonic matter and, in turn, light.

Dark energy is even more problematic. It's the force that scientists see driving the acceleration of the universe's expansion.

It concerns a period of expansion separate from the universe's initial inflation, which was triggered by the Big Bang. After that early expansion slowed to a near halt, in a later epoch, the universe unexplainably started to expand again. This expansion rate is actually speeding up to this day, with dark energy used to account for that action.

Yet, as we've discussed, scientists don't actually know what dark energy is.

To see why that is troubling, imagine pushing a child on a swing. The Big Bang is akin to your first and only push that gets the swing in motion. The swing may keep going for a short while, even without any action from you, then it will come to a half. Then, imagine that it suddenly begins motion again despite you just standing there. And not only that, but it swings faster and faster, reaching higher and higher points. This is similar to what dark energy is doing to the very fabric of space.

CERN hopes the high-energy collisions of the FCC could reveal the nature of this ongoing, late-universe push and the particles that make up dark matter.

However, it will be some time before this future particle accelerator is ready to embark on its investigation of the dark universe.
The timeline and cost of the Future Circular Collider

In 2028, three years after the completion of the FCC feasibility study, CERN member states will convene to decide if the FCC will get the go-ahead. Should the future collider get greenlit, CERN says, construction will begin in the mid-2030s.

The FCC will be completed in stages. The first stage is a electron-positron collider (FCC-ee) that will slam together negatively charged electrons, their positive antiparticle counterparts, known as positrons, and other light particles. CERN adds that FCC-ee should start operations in 2045.

The second machine of the FCC will be a proton colliding accelerator (FCC-hh) sitting alongside the FCC-ee in the same evacuated tunnel buried under the French-Swiss Alps and Lake Geneva. This part would come online no sooner than 2070, according to CERN.

Related Stories:

— Massive galaxy with no dark matter is a cosmic puzzle

— Researchers dig deep underground in hopes of finally observing dark matter

— Euclid 'dark universe' telescope captures 1st full-color views of the cosmos (images)

At the CERN press conference, Gianotti laid out some of the costs of the FCC, saying that the first FCC-ee stage alone would cost an estimated $17 billion USD.

CERN's Director general justified the cost by adding that the FCC is the only machine that would allow humanity to make the big jump in studying matter needed to crack the secrets of the dark universe.

A four-legged ‘Robodog’ is patrolling the Large Hadron Collider

Mack DeGeurin
Thu, February 8, 2024 

CERT’s four-legged Robodog can maneuver through cramped spaces and use sensors to spot fires, leaks, or other hazards.


Traversing through the dark, underground areas of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland isn't for the faint of heart. The world’s most powerful particle accelerator violently smashes protons and other subatomic particles together at nearly the speed of light, which can emit radiation at levels potentially harmful to humans. If that weren't enough, long stretches of compact, cluttered areas and uneven surface areas throughout the facility make stable footing a necessity.

Scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) are turning to four-legged, dog-inspired robots to solve that problem. This week, CERN showed off its recently developed CERNquadbot robot which they said successfully completed its first radiation survey in CERN’s North Area, the facility's largest experimental area. Looking forward, CERN plans to have its “Robodog” trot through other experiment caves to analyze areas and look for hazards.

Why does CERT need a robot dog?

The hazardous, sometimes cramped confines of the LHC’s experiments caverns pose challenges to both human workers and past robot designs alike. Temporary radiation levels and other environmental hazards like fires and potential water leaks can make some areas temporarily inaccessible to humans. Other past CERT robots, while adept at using strong robotics arms to carry heavy objects over distance, struggle to traverse over uneven ground. Stairs, similarly, are a nonstarter for these mostly wheeled and tracked robots.

That’s where CERT’s robot dog comes in. CERTquadbot’s four, dog-like legs allow it to traverse up and down and side to side, all while adjusting for slight changes on the ground's surface. A video of the robot at work shows it tic-tacking its four metal legs up and down as it navigates through what looks like pavement and a metal grated floor, all the while using onboard sensors to analyze its surroundings. A human operator can be seen nearby directing the robot using a controller. For a touch of added flair, the robot can also briefly stand up on its two hind legs. The Robodog had to use all of its various maneuverability during its recent test-run up the North area, which was reportedly filled with obstacles.

“There are large bundles of loose wires and pipes on the ground that slip and move, making them unpassable for wheeled robots and difficult even for humans,” CERN’s Controls, Electronics and Mechatronics robotics engineer Chris McGreavy said in a statement.

Thankfully for the CERN scientists, the Robodog rose to the occasion. And unlike other living dogs, this one didn’t need a tasty treat for a reward.

“There were no issues at all: the robot was completely stable throughout the inspection,” McGreavy added.

https://youtu.be/cbcpJZicJ2w?si=35A_xHeZ7si6lhtX

Now with the successful test completed, CERN says it's upgrading the robot and preparing it and its successors to deploy in experiment caves, including the ALICE detector which is used to study quark-gluon plasma. These areas often feature stairs and other complex surfaces that would stump CERN’s other, less maneuverable robots. Once inside, the robot dogs will monitor the area for hazards like fire and water leaks or quickly respond to alarms.

CERN directed PopSci to this blog post when we asked for more details regarding the robot.

Dog-inspired dogs are going where humans can’t

Four-legged quadruped robots have risen in popularity across numerous industries in recent years for their ability to nimbly access areas either too cumbersome or dangerous for humans and larger robots to access. Boston Dynamics’ “Spot,” possibly the most famous quadruped robot currently on the market, has been used to inspect dangerous offshore oil drilling sites, explore old abandoned mining facilities, and even monitor a major sports arena in Atlanta, Georgia. More controversially, law enforcement officials in New York City City and at the southern US border have also turned to these quadruped style robots to explore areas otherwise deemed too hazardous for humans.

Still, CERN doesn’t expect its new Robodog to completely eliminate the need for the other models in its family of robots. Instead, the various robots will work together in tandem, using their respective strengths to fill in gaps with the ultimate goal of hopefully speeding up the process of scientific discovery.

Plans for collider ‘to smash particles together to unveil Universe’s mysteries’

Nina Massey, PA Science Correspondent
Mon, 5 February 2024 



Researchers are developing plans for a new collider that could smash particles together at a greater force than currently possible in a bid to shed light on some of the Universe’s biggest mysteries.

The European Organisation for Nuclear Research’s (Cern) Large Hadron Collider (LHC), will complete its mission around 2040, and experts are looking at what could replace it.

Early estimates suggest the new machine, called the Future Circular Collider (FCC), would cost around £13.7 billion (15 billion Swiss Francs).

It is expected to be installed in a tunnel measuring some 91 kilometres in circumference at a depth of between 100 and 400 metres on French and Swiss territory.

Using the highest energies, it will smash particles together in the hope that new findings will change the world of physics, and understanding of how the Universe works.

On Monday, Cern announced that a mid-term feasibility study did not find a “technical showstopper”.

Among other things, the review was also able to identify the ideal location for the infrastructure of the project, and the size of the proposed tunnel.

In 2012, the LHC detected a new particle called the Higgs Boson, which provides a new way to look at the Universe.

However, dark matter and dark energy have remained elusive, and researchers hope the new collider will be able to answer some of science’s greatest unanswered questions.

Cern’s director general, Professor Fabiola Gianotti, said: “The FCC will be an unprecedented instrument to explore the law of physics and of nature, at the smallest scales and at the highest energies.”

She added: “[It] will allow us to address some of the outstanding questions in fundamental physics today in our knowledge of the fundamental constituents of matter and the structure and evolution of the Universe.”

Addressing critics who suggest the project is very expensive, and there are no guarantees it will answer outstanding questions about the Universe, Eliezer Rabinovici, president of the Cern council, said the aim was to build “discovery machines”, and not “confirmation machines”.

Prof Gianotti added: “We build the facility, and experimental facilities not to run behind the prediction, [or] correct calculation.

“Our goal is to address open questions, then of course, theories develop, and ideas on how to answer those questions.

“But nature may have chosen a completely different path. So our goal is to look at the open question and try to find an answer, whichever answer, nature has decided out there.

“It’s true that at the moment, we do not have a clear theoretical guidance on what we should look for, but it is exactly at times where we lack theoretical guidance – which means we do not have a clear idea of how nature may answer the open question – that we need to build instruments.

“Because the instruments will allow us to make a big step forward towards addressing the question, or also telling us what are the right questions to ask.”

If approved, the FCC could be running by the early to mid 2040s.

Professor Tim Gershon, elementary particle physics group, University of Warwick, said: “The so-called Future Circular Collider is Cern’s proposal to address this challenge.

“It will provide the ability to measure the properties of the Higgs Boson in unprecedented precision, and in so doing to look at the Universe in new ways.

“It is hoped that this will provide answers to some of the most important fundamental questions about the Universe, such as what happened in its earliest moments.

“The latest report on the ongoing FCC feasibility studies is encouraging – in the most optimistic scenario the new collider could start to produce data in just over two decades from now.

“But there is still a very long way to go.”

Plan for Europe's huge new particle collider takes shape

Agence France-Presse
February 5, 2024

The FCC would form a new circular tunnel under France and Switzerland © HANDOUT / European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN)/AFP/File

Europe's CERN laboratory revealed more details Monday about its plans for a huge new particle accelerator that would dwarf the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), ramping up efforts to uncover the underlying secrets of the universe.

If approved, the Future Circular Collider (FCC) would start smashing its first particles together around the middle of this century -- and start its highest-energy collisions around 2070.

Running under France and Switzerland, it would be more than triple the length of CERN's LHC, currently the largest and most powerful particle accelerator.

The idea behind both is to send particles spinning around a ring to smash into each at nearly the speed of light, so that the collisions reveal their true nature.

Among other discoveries, the LHC made history in 2012 when it allowed scientists to observe the Higgs boson for the first time.

But the LHC, which cost $5.6 billion and began operating in 2010, is expected to have run its course by around 2040.

The faster and more powerful FCC would allow scientists to continue pushing the envelope. They hope it could confirm the existence of more particles -- the building blocks of matter -- which so far have only been theorised.

Another unfinished job for science is working out exactly what 95 percent of the universe is made of. About 68 percent of the universe is believed to be dark energy while 27 percent is dark matter -- both remain a complete mystery.

Another unknown is why there is so little antimatter in the universe, compared to matter.

CERN hopes that a massive upgrade of humanity's ability to smash particles could shed light on these enigmas and more.

"Our aim is to study the properties of matter at the smallest scale and highest energy," CERN director-general Fabiola Gianotti said as she presented an interim report in Geneva.

The report laid out the first findings of a FCC feasibility study that will be finalised by 2025.

$17 billion first stage

In 2028, CERN's member states, which include the UK and Israel, will decide whether or not to go through with the plan.

If given the green light, construction on the collider would start in 2033.

The project is split into parts.

In 2048, the "electron-positron" collider would start smashing light particles, with the aim of further investigating the Higgs boson and what is called the weak force, one of the four fundamental forces.

The cost of the tunnel, infrastructure and the first stage of the collider would be about 15 billion Swiss Francs ($17 billion), Gianotti said.

The heavy duty hadron collider, which would smash protons together, would only come online in 2070.

Its energy target would be 100 trillion electronvolts -- smashing the LHC's record of 13.6 trillion.

Gianotti said this later collider is the "only machine" that would allow humanity "to make a big jump in studying matter".

After eight years of study, the configuration chosen for the FCC was a new circular tunnel 90.7 kilometres (56.5 miles) long and 5.5 metres (feet) in diameter.

The tunnel, which would connect to the LHC, would pass under the Geneva region and its namesake lake in Switzerland, and loop round to the south near the picturesque French town of Annecy.

Eight technical and scientific sites would be built on the surface.

CERN said it is consulting with the regions along the route and plans to carry out impact studies on how the tunnel would affect the area.

© 2024 AFP

 

Advisory panel issues field-defining recommendations for investments in particle physics research

Argonne is set to contribute to the realization of the recommendations, which will shape the next decade of discovery in particle physics

Reports and Proceedings

DOE/ARGONNE NATIONAL LABORATORY

Contributions from Argonne will drive innovation in particle physics and shed light on outstanding mysteries in the field.

Yesterday marked the release of a highly anticipated report from the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel (P5), unveiling an exciting new roadmap for unlocking the secrets of the cosmos through particle physics.

The report was released by the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel to the High Energy Physics program of the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the National Science Foundation’s Division of Physics. It outlines particle physicists’ recommendations for research priorities in a field whose projects — such as building new accelerator facilities — can take years or decades, contributions from thousands of scientists and billions of dollars

The 2023 P5 report represents the major activity in the field of particle physics that delivers recommendations to U.S. funding agencies. This year’s report builds on the output of the 2021 Snowmass planning exercise — a process organized by the American Physical Society’s (APS) Division of Particles and Fields that convened particle physicists and cosmologists from around the world to outline research priorities. This membership division constitutes the only independent body in the U.S. that represents particle physics as a whole.

“With our state-of-the-art facilities and community of dedicated scientists, Argonne’s contributions are shaping the global trajectory of high-energy physics.” — Rik Yoshida, Argonne High Energy Physics Division Director

“The P5 report will lay the foundation for a very bright future in the field,” said R. Sekhar Chivukula, 2023 chair of the APS Division of Particles and Fields and a distinguished professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego. ​“There are extraordinarily important scientific questions remaining in particle physics, which the U.S. particle physics community has both the capability and opportunity to help address, within our own facilities and as a member of the global high energy physics community.”

The report includes a range of budget-conscious recommendations for federal investments in research programs, the U.S. technical workforce and the technology and infrastructure needed to realize the next generation of transformative discoveries related to fundamental physics and the origin of the universe. For example, the report recommends continued support for the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE), based out of DOE’s Fermilab in Illinois, for CMB-S4, a network of ground-based telescopes designed to observe the cosmic microwave background (CMB), and for the planned expansion of the South Pole’s neutrino observatory, an international collaboration known as IceCube-Gen2, in a facility operated by the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Researchers at DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory stand at the forefront of high energy physics and are poised to contribute significantly to the advancement of the field over the next decade. They are exploring the fundamental nature of the universe and pioneering innovative technologies with far-reaching implications. In particular, Argonne’s High Energy Physics (HEP) division leverages the laboratory’s suite of multidisciplinary facilities and equipment — including world-class scientific computing capabilities — to further scientific discovery and advance accelerator technology. For example, Argonne’s contributions to key high energy physics collaborations include the design and fabrication of components for DUNE, the development of cutting-edge detectors for CMB-S4 and more.

“With our state-of-the-art facilities and community of dedicated scientists, Argonne’s contributions are helping to shape the global trajectory of high-energy physics,” said Rik Yoshida, director of Argonne’s HEP division. ​“This report reflects the collective wisdom of the high energy physics community, and we look forward to leveraging our expertise and capabilities here at Argonne to help uncover the mysteries of the universe, drive innovation, inspire future generations of scientists and bolster our nation’s vital role in the future of particle physics.”

“In the P5 exercise, it’s really important that we take this broad look at where the field of particle physics is headed, to deliver a report that amounts to a strategic plan for the U.S. community with a 10-year budgetary timeline and a 20-year context. The panel thought about where the next big discoveries might lie and how we could maximize impact within budget, to support future discoveries and the next generation of researchers and technical workers who will be needed to achieve them,” said Karsten Heeger, P5 panel deputy chair and Eugene Higgins Professor and chair of physics at Yale University.

New knowledge, and new technologies, set the stage for the most recent Snowmass and P5 convenings. ​“The Higgs boson had just been discovered before the previous P5 process, and now our continued study of the particle has greatly informed what we think may lie beyond the standard model of particle physics,” said Hitoshi Murayama, P5 panel chair and the MacAdams Professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. ​“Our thinking about what dark matter might be has also changed, forcing the community to look elsewhere — to the cosmos. And in 2015, the discovery of gravitational waves was reported. Accelerator technology is changing too, which has shifted the discussion to the technology R&D needed to build the next-generation particle collider.”

The U.S. participates in several major international scientific collaborations in high energy physics and cosmology, including the European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN), which operates the Large Hadron Collider, where the Higgs boson was discovered in 2012. The P5 report recommends that the U.S. support a significant in-kind contribution to a new international facility, the ​“Higgs factory,” to further our understanding of the

Advisory panel issues field-defining recommendations for US government investments in particle physics research

Activities of the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel are supported in part by the American Physical Society’s Division of Particles and Fields

Reports and Proceedings

AMERICAN PHYSICAL SOCIETY

The High Energy Physics Advisory Panel (HEPAP) to the High Energy Physics program of the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation’s Division of Physics has released a new Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel (P5) report, which outlines particle physicists’ recommendations for research priorities in a field whose projects — such as building new accelerator facilities — can take years or decades, contributions from thousands of scientists, and billions of dollars. 

The 2023 P5 report represents the major activity in the field of particle physics that delivers recommendations to U.S. funding agencies. This year’s report builds on the output of the 2021 Snowmass planning exercise — a process organized by the American Physical Society (APS)’s Division of Particles and Fields that convened particle physicists and cosmologists from around the world to outline research priorities. This membership division constitutes the only independent body in the United States that represents particle physics as a whole.

“The P5 report will lay the foundation for a very bright future in the field,” said R. Sekhar Chivukula, 2023 chair of the APS Division of Particles and Fields and a Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of California, San Diego. “There are extraordinarily important scientific questions remaining in particle physics, which the U.S. particle physics community has both the capability and opportunity to help address, within our own facilities and as a member of the global high energy physics community.”

The report includes a range of budget-conscious recommendations for federal investments in research programs, the U.S. technical workforce, and the technology and infrastructure needed to realize the next generation of transformative discoveries related to fundamental physics and the origin of the universe. For example, the report recommends continued support for the 

Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE), based out of Fermilab in Illinois, for CMB-S4, a network of ground-based telescopes designed to observe the cosmic microwave background, and for the planned expansion of the South Pole’s neutrino observatory, an international collaboration known as IceCube-Gen2, in a facility operated by the University of Wisconsin–Madison. 

“In the P5 exercise, it’s really important that we take this broad look at where the field of particle physics is headed, to deliver a report that amounts to a strategic plan for the U.S. community with a 10-year budgetary timeline and a 20-year context. The panel thought about where the next big discoveries might lie and how we could maximize impact within budget, to support future discoveries and the next generation of researchers and technical workers who will be needed to achieve them,” said Karsten Heeger, P5 panel deputy chair and Eugene Higgins Professor and chair of physics at Yale University.

New knowledge, and new technologies, set the stage for the most recent Snowmass and P5 convenings. “The Higgs boson had just been discovered before the previous P5 process, and now our continued study of the particle has greatly informed what we think may lie beyond the standard model of particle physics,” said Hitoshi Murayama, P5 panel chair and the MacAdams Professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. “Our thinking about what dark matter might be has also changed, forcing the community to look elsewhere — to the cosmos. And in 2015, the discovery of gravitational waves was reported. Accelerator technology is changing too, which has shifted the discussion to the technology R&D needed to build the next-generation particle collider.”  

The United States participates in several major international scientific collaborations in high energy physics and cosmology, including the European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN), which operates the Large Hadron Collider, where the Higgs boson was discovered in 2012. The P5 report recommends that the United States support a significant in-kind contribution to a new international facility, the ‘Higgs factory,’ to further our understanding of the Higgs boson. It also recommends that the United States study the possibility of hosting the next most-advanced particle collider facility, to reinforce the country’s leading role in international high energy physics for decades to come.

# # #

The American Physical Society is a nonprofit membership organization working to advance and diffuse the knowledge of physics through its outstanding research journals, scientific meetings, and education, outreach, advocacy, and international activities. APS represents more than 50,000 members, including physicists in academia, national laboratories, and industry in the United States and throughout the world.

BNL: Advisory panel issues field-defining recommendations for U.S. government investments in particle physics research

Reports and Proceedings

DOE/BROOKHAVEN NATIONAL LABORATORY

The following news release on the 2023 Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel (P5) report is based on one issued today by the American Physical Society (APS) with added content specific to the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory. For more information about Brookhaven Lab’s research in particle physics, contact: Karen McNulty Walsh, kmcnulty@bnl.gov, (631) 344-8350. For APS media inquiries, contact Anna Torres, torres@aps.org, (301) 209-3605.

WASHINGTON, D.C.—The High Energy Physics Advisory Panel (HEPAP) to the High Energy Physics program of the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation’s Division of Physics has released a new Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel (P5) report, which outlines particle physicists’ recommendations for research priorities in the field. The 2023 P5 report was posted online yesterday and was voted on and accepted by HEPAP today.

The 2023 P5 report represents the major activity in the field of particle physics that delivers recommendations to U.S. funding agencies. This year’s report builds on the output of the 2021 Snowmass planning exercise—a process organized by the American Physical Society (APS)’s Division of Particles and Fields that convened particle physicists and cosmologists from around the world to outline research priorities. This membership division constitutes the only independent body in the United States that represents particle physics as a whole.

“The P5 report will lay the foundation for a very bright future in the field,” said R. Sekhar Chivukula, 2023 chair of the APS Division of Particles and Fields and a Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of California, San Diego. “There are extraordinarily important scientific questions remaining in particle physics, which the U.S. particle physics community has both the capability and opportunity to help address, within our own facilities and as a member of the global high energy physics community.”

“We welcome the P5 report recommendations, which define a strong and balanced U.S. particle physics program based on input from the Snowmass community-wide process,” said Brookhaven National Laboratory Director JoAnne Hewett. “Building on our decades of expertise in high energy physics and facility design and operation, we are eager to actively engage and lead in developing, constructing, and operating the next generation of facilities and experiments to explore the Quantum Universe.”

The report includes a range of budget-conscious recommendations for federal investments in research programs, the U.S. technical workforce, and the technology and infrastructure needed to realize the next generation of transformative discoveries related to fundamental physics and the origin of the universe. For example, the report recommends continued support for the high-luminosity upgrades at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), based in Europe, for the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE), based out of Fermilab in Illinois, for CMB-S4, a network of ground-based telescopes designed to observe the cosmic microwave background, and for the planned expansion of the South Pole’s neutrino observatory, an international collaboration known as IceCube-Gen2, in a facility operated by the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

“In the P5 exercise, it’s really important that we take this broad look at where the field of particle physics is headed, to deliver a report that amounts to a strategic plan for the U.S. community with a 10-year budgetary timeline and a 20-year context. The panel thought about where the next big discoveries might lie and how we could maximize impact within budget, to support future discoveries and the next generation of researchers and technical workers who will be needed to achieve them,” said Karsten Heeger, P5 panel deputy chair and Eugene Higgins Professor and chair of physics at Yale University.

New knowledge, and new technologies, set the stage for the most recent Snowmass and P5 convenings. “The Higgs boson had just been discovered before the previous P5 process, and now our continued study of the particle has greatly informed what we think may lie beyond the standard model of particle physics,” said Hitoshi Murayama, P5 panel chair and the MacAdams Professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. “Our thinking about what dark matter might be has also changed, forcing the community to look elsewhere—to the cosmos. And in 2015, the discovery of gravitational waves was reported. Accelerator technology is changing too, which has shifted the discussion to the technology R&D needed to build the next-generation particle collider.”

The United States participates in several major international scientific collaborations in high energy physics and cosmology, including the European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN), which operates the Large Hadron Collider, where the Higgs boson was discovered in 2012. The P5 report recommends that the United States support a significant in-kind contribution to a new international facility, the ‘Higgs Factory,’ to further our understanding of the Higgs boson. It also recommends that the United States study the possibility of hosting the next most-advanced particle collider facility, to reinforce the country’s leading role in international high energy physics for decades to come.

DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory contributes to many of the projects highlighted in the P5 report, including these major efforts:

Brookhaven Lab serves as the U.S. host laboratory for the ATLAS experiment, one of four major detectors at the LHC. ATLAS has opened new frontiers of knowledge about elementary particles and their interactions, including the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson. Brookhaven Lab scientists contributed to that groundbreaking discovery and subsequent studies of Higgs properties, as well as ATLAS project management and experiment operations. They also run a state-of-the-art computing center for storing and sharing ATLAS data with collaborators around the world. Brookhaven physicists, engineers, and technical staff also helped design and build the magnets that steer the LHC’s beams of protons and other ions into collisions—including magnets enabling drastically increased collision rates for future discoveries.

In addition, the Brookhaven team has proposed ideas for and is dedicated to working closely with international and U.S. partners to develop a Higgs factory and its associated detectors. This facility, as recommended in the P5 report, would create copious numbers of Higgs particles and allow detailed, precision studies of their properties—potentially opening the door to discovering discrepancies between theory and experiment that could reveal new physics. The P5 panel also recommends dedicated R&D to explore a suite of promising future projects, including colliders that can reach even higher energies than Higgs factories. Brookhaven scientists are actively engaged in the development of technologies for one such approach—a machine that could collide particles called muons, heavy cousins of electrons.

Brookhaven Lab is also playing a leading role in DUNE. This Fermilab-based experiment will send beams of elusive subatomic particles called neutrinos hundreds of miles through Earth’s crust to detectors deep underground in South Dakota. Understanding how neutrinos change as they travel may help unravel mysteries about how our universe evolved, including potentially an asymmetry between matter and antimatter that accounts for our universe being composed mostly of matter. Brookhaven physicists and staff helped develop the methods for creating neutrinos, simulations for testing and controlling characteristics of the beam, specialized electronics and other detector materials needed to study key neutrino characteristics, and the software and computational tools that will be used to capture neutrino signals and process vast quantities of data. Brookhaven scientists are leading the design of a third underground detector module for DUNE, highlighted in the P5 report as part of a re-envisioned second phase of this project.

Going beyond the secrets of the matter that makes up our world and its scantly present antimatter partner, Brookhaven scientists seek to explore the unknowns of so-called dark matter and dark energy, which are highlighted among the scientific drivers for new discoveries by the P5 panel and together make up more than 95% of our universe. One tool for this research is a telescope that will be housed at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory high on a mountaintop in Chile. The DOE-funded effort to build the camera for the telescope was managed by SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. Brookhaven Lab led construction of the camera’s 3.2 gigapixel “digital film”—the biggest charge-coupled device (CCD) array ever built—and will support the telescope’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). LSST will be an unparalleled wide-field astronomical survey of our universe—wider and deeper in volume than all previous surveys combined.

Brookhaven Lab is also actively engaged in developing small- and medium-scale facilities and experiments and in building capabilities in machine learning/artificial intelligence, quantum information science, and microelectronics that will help to push the frontiers of discovery in high energy physics with potential benefit for other fields. The Lab is also committed to attracting, building, and supporting a diverse workforce to carry out these ambitious research programs, and to fostering a climate of innovation.

# # #

Activities of the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel are supported in part by
the American Physical Society’s Division of Particles and Fields

The American Physical Society is a nonprofit membership organization working to advance and diffuse the knowledge of physics through its outstanding research journals, scientific meetings, and education, outreach, advocacy, and international activities. APS represents more than 50,000 members, including physicists in academia, national laboratories, and industry in the United States and throughout the world.

Brookhaven National Laboratory is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit science.energy.gov.

Follow @BrookhavenLab on social media. Find us on Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. Higgs boson.

It also recommends that the U.S. study the possibility of hosting the next most-advanced particle collider facility to reinforce the country’s leading role in international high energy physics for decades to come.

Activities of the P5 are supported in part by the APS’s Division of Particles and Fields.

The American Physical Society is a nonprofit membership organization working to advance and diffuse the knowledge of physics through its outstanding research journals, scientific meetings, and education, outreach, advocacy, and international activities. APS represents more than 50,000 members, including physicists in academia, national laboratories, and industry in the United States and throughout the world.

Argonne National Laboratory seeks solutions to pressing national problems in science and technology. The nation’s first national laboratory, Argonne conducts leading-edge basic and applied scientific research in virtually every scientific discipline. Argonne researchers work closely with researchers from hundreds of companies, universities, and federal, state and municipal agencies to help them solve their specific problems, advance America’s scientific leadership and prepare the nation for a better future. With employees from more than 60 nations, Argonne is managed by UChicago Argonne, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit https://​ener​gy​.gov/​s​c​ience.